Amateur Electronics

Tag Archives: game of life

There are so many ways to tell the time. DIYers have been doing clocks since the Ancient Egypt (obelisks lacked portability, thou). Every modern maker has a clock amongst her first projects. I have done some myself, including a fibonacci clock, a wordclock with a fancy green matrix effect and an unreleased project that hopefully will see the light someday soon.

But recently I came back to the idea behind the wordclock before, to extend it in different ways:

Replace the ATMega328P with an ESP8266 (NTP support and user interaction)

Smaller sizes (8×8 LED matrices)

Smaller PCB, less buttons

Add buzzer for alarms

Replace the 3D printed part with a wooden grid cut in laser

Completely closed enclosure, better presentation

Fix some issues with the original board (like the lack of a beefy capacitor across the LED matrix power lines).